State Underestimated Complexity Of Task

If you have ever signed a legally binding agreement in haste and lived to regret it, then you know it is an experience you are unlikely to repeat.

It's bad enough when you are the only one affected by your haste, but it can be much worse if you represent a community that feels the impact.

So there is reason to wonder why the state wants local governments and school boards to rush into signing interlocal agreements on school concurrency.

School concurrency addresses the problem of unrestricted building of residential developments near schools, which is the most common cause of school overcrowding. It does this by giving local governments authority to deny permits to new residential developments if the school board finds that the developments will cause nearby schools to become overcrowded.

It is expensive. In order to avoid negative impacts on growth, school boards have to build new school facilities to accommodate that growth at the same time the growth occurs. Preliminary estimates of the cost of the statewide need for these new facilities start at $10 billion.

Just last year, lawmakers in Tallahassee handed down a mandate to school boards and local governments to create school concurrency systems by no later than December 2008.

The key to each of those systems is an interlocal agreement created by a school board and the local governments in its district. This ILA is the rulebook by which all else concerning the system will be governed.

Since the ILA is central to a system that has the potential to stymie growth and/or incur huge costs, you might think that everyone concerned would take time to craft it carefully. In fact, the state has used cash incentives to speed up the process of creating ILAs with an eye to mass producing them statewide.

There are two components to this crash program: a pilot communities program and an accelerated ILA development grant program.

Under the pilot communities program, six counties were each given $200,000 to complete their systems long before the December 2008 deadline. For example, each pilot county had to submit a completed ILA to the state by no later than March 1, 2006. These were then to be used by the remaining counties as models for their own agreements.

Under the accelerated development program, the state offered grants to those remaining counties that agree to complete their ILAs by Sept. 1, 2006. According to reports, 41 counties applied for and received these grants.

Unfortunately, things have not worked out as smoothly as the state expected. Several of the pilot communities are still wrangling over details of their ILAs. And the state itself hasn't been able to come up with statewide standards for significant aspects of the pilot communities' model agreements.

Three of the most fundamental points that haven't been settled yet include:

Setting a standard to decide when a school is legally overcrowded, known as a level of service standard.

Creating a uniform method to predict how many students will come into the school system from a new development, known as a student generation multiplier.

Determining whether or not charter schools will be included under school concurrency.

Uncertainty on any of these points would give cause for concern. The fact that all three remain unsettled at this late date indicates that the state seriously underestimated the complexity of implementing school concurrency statewide.

Err in haste and regret at leisure is a saying that most of us are all too familiar with. It seems entirely reasonable for all concerned to slow down on school concurrency ILAs before someone makes a hasty error that they, and the rest of us, will live to regret.

Peter Rebmann is a founding member and president of the nonprofit Alachua County School Concurrency Project, on the Web at www.acscp.org.